Is there an "obesity paradox" in diabetes?

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Obesity and diabetes might not be the double whammy you'd expect, according to a fresh look at older studies.

Surprisingly, researchers found that overweight and obese people who get diagnosed with the blood sugar disorder tend to live longer than their leaner peers.

This so-called "obesity paradox" has been observed before in chronic diseases like heart and kidney failure, said Mercedes R. Carnethon of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago.

But that doesn't mean you should start downing ice cream and other high-calorie foods if you just found out you have diabetes, Carnethon told Reuters Health. Nor does it mean that padding your waist is a good way to improve your prognosis before you get the disease.

In fact, it's probably not that excessive pounds are protective, said Carnethon, but rather that lean people who get diabetes are somehow predisposed to worse health.

"Perhaps those individuals are somehow genetically loaded to develop diabetes and have higher mortality," she said. "A normal-weight person who has diabetes has an extremely high mortality rate."

The new findings are based on data from five earlier studies that tracked people over time to identify risk factors for heart disease. More than 2,600 participants developed type 2 diabetes during the studies, and 12 percent of them had a normal weight when they got the diagnosis.

The death rate was 1.5 percent per year among overweight and obese people, compared to 2.8 percent per year among their trimmer peers.

After accounting for several risk factors for heart disease - including age, blood pressure, high cholesterol and smoking - lean people were more than twice as likely to die at any given point as heavier people. The same held true for deaths caused by heart disease, which is linked to obesity.

"It was a little bit unexpected to see that," said Carnethon.

One potential limitation of the study is that the researchers couldn't always account for how much people smoked, which might explain part of the results.

It's also possible that a few people might have been diagnosed with diabetes outside of the studies and been told to slim down by their own doctor before they were seen by the study researchers. That could also have contributed to the findings, although Carnethon said the effect would be small.

She added that it's not clear how to best treat normal-weight people with type 2 diabetes, although weight training seems preferable over cardio exercise.

Older people and people of Asian descent are more likely to be normal-weight when diagnosed with diabetes, and Carnethon stressed that doctors need to take the disorder extra seriously when it's not accompanied by obesity.

"These findings do apply to a growing segment of the population," she said.